I grew up in St. Paul Minnesota, but my Aunt and Uncle had a cabin on Madeline Island. You had to take a ferry from Duluth, on Lake Superior, to get there. It was a long drive from the city but such a beautiful and tranquil place. I enjoyed summer weekends there swimming and playing with my cousins. The water was quite cold, but we didn’t mind on hot summer days.
After being offered a review copy of Safe From the Sea (see my review here), I invited Peter Geye to do a guest post to tell you more about one of the Great Lakes, Lake Superior. Welcome To So Many Precious Books, Peter!
Up On the North Shore by Peter Geyre
Lake Superior is to a Minnesota boy what the mountains are to a kid from Colorado, what the seaside is to lobsterman’s son up in Maine. At least it is to this Minnesota boy. It’s our natural wonder, the place on the map next to which we live.
Starting in Duluth and bearing east/northeast, the North Shore winds about one hundred and fifty miles up to the Canadian border. It’s a landscape full of rivers and streams, of incalculable forests, of small towns and ports. There have been days driving along the shore that I’ve counted no less than a hundred whitetail deer foraging in the ditch. I’ve seen bear and moose and wolf, all along the roadside like spectators at a parade. I’ve seen six- or seven-foot breakers rolling onto the shore, heard late-winter ice-floes booming like gunshot. The average water temperature of the big lake they call Gitchi Gummi is only forty degrees, and though it’s been warming lately, the temperature stays pretty constant. In other words, it’s usually as cold as a glass of ice water.
I’ve always believed that Lake Superior possesses a secret, some truth kept by the cold and unfathomable water. Who can say why?
When I was a kid we used to rent cabins or pitch our tent in the state parks along the North Shore. Some of my earliest memories are of those trips. I remember one summer we rented a cabin near Splitrock lighthouse. The cabin was on a cove, atop a craggy bunch of rocks. The lodge had a rowboat you could rent to putter around the cove, and one warm afternoon my father and I went out for an adventure. I remember not being far off shore, and being able to look into the water and see the bottom of the lake. It didn’t look far, looked like I’d be in water no deeper than my waist if I jumped over the gunwale for a swim. I asked my dad if could I do it. I asked him knowing it’d be cold. He must have judged the water to be not so deep himself, because he said sure. So over I went.
We indeed misjudged the depth, and I was in over my head. I kicked for the surface and reached for my dad’s outstretched hand and he pulled me back into the little rowboat. He made sure I was okay and we laughed about it and no doubt he tousled my wet hair and said, Geez, he was sorry about that.
Though I’ve tried many times to describe the feeling of being in that water, I’ve never come close. It took my breath away, literally, like someone had hit me on the back with a canoe paddle. It was painful in the most mysterious of ways. And it’s a perfect example of the secret the water holds, or the one I imagine it does.
I knew when I set out to write Safe from the Sea that I wanted to convey that secret, knew that the scene of the wreck of the ore boat Ragnarok and the survivors’ nightmare would depend on my ability to translate the feeling from memory to the page. And I’m not exaggerating to say that I sometimes found myself getting that seized-up, hit-by-a-paddle sensation while I wrote those scenes. In fact, I needed the feeling, knew if I didn’t have it, I wasn’t getting the scene right.
The North Shore elicits so many mysterious feelings in me, and I tried to translate many of them in my book. The story of jumping from the rowboat could be told with a half-dozen different principles, for a half-dozen different scenes. And I hope readers of Safe from the Sea will see the shore in all her wild beauty. Those miles of road, of trees and wilderness, the wind off the lake, all of it’s as important as any of the human characters. And they’re all beholden to it.
Peter Geye received his MFA from the University of New Orleans and his PHD from Western Michigan University, where he was editor of Third Coast. He was born and raised in Minneapolis and continues to live there with his wife and three children. This is his first novel. ”
Thanks to Caitlin Hamilton Summie of Unbridled Books, I am giving away one copy of Safe From the Sea. Trust me, you want this book!
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Only one entry per household/IP address
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